and, to my astonishment, it was actually accepted and played by the band in Kintschy’s Swiss Chalet.  That this man had not the smallest capacity to teach me anything never once occurred to me; I was so firmly convinced of his originality that there was no need for him to prove it further than by listening patiently to my enthusiastic outpourings.  But as, in course of time, several of his own friends joined us, I could not help noticing that the worthy Flachs was regarded by them all as a half-witted fool.  At first this merely pained me, but a strange incident unexpectedly occurred which converted me to the general opinion about him.  Flachs was a man of some means, and had fallen into the toils of a young lady of dubious character who he believed was deeply in love with him.  One day, without warning, I found his house closed to me, and discovered, to my astonishment, that jealousy was the cause.  The unexpected discovery of this liaison, which was my first experience of such a case, filled me with a strange horror.  My friend suddenly appeared to me even more mad than he really was.  I felt so ashamed of my persistent blindness that for some time to come I never went to any of the garden concerts for fear I should meet my sham Kreissler.

By this time I had composed my first Sonata in D minor.  I had also begun a pastoral play, and had worked it out in what I felt sure must be an entirely unprecedented way.

I chose Goethe’s Laune der Verliebten as a model for the form and plot of my work.  I scarcely even drafted out the libretto, however, but worked it out at the same time as the music and orchestration, so that, while I was writing out one page of the score, I had not even thought out the words for the next page.  I remember distinctly that following this extraordinary method, although I had not acquired the slightest knowledge about writing for instruments, I actually worked out a fairly long passage which finally resolved itself into a scene for three female voices followed by the air for the tenor.  My bent for writing for the orchestra was so strong that I procured a score of Don Juan, and set to work on what I then considered a very careful orchestration of a fairly long air for soprano.  I also wrote a quartette in D major after I had myself sufficiently mastered the alto for the viola, my ignorance of which had caused me great difficulty only a short time before, when I was studying a quartette by Haydn.

Armed with these works, I set out in the summer on my first journey as a musician.  My sister Clara, who was married to the singer Wolfram, had an engagement at the theatre at Magdeburg, whither, in characteristic fashion, I set forth upon my adventure on foot.